InfoWorld Technical Director Switches, And Likes it

Appleis iSwitchi campaign is such a success that stories about Switchers seem as plentiful as fleas on a hillbilly hound. Itis getting so you canit spit without hitting an ex-PC owner happily mousing on a shiny new Mac. What is interesting these days is when an IT person swaps out his own passel of PCs, servers and desktops, for an Xserve, and Xserve RAID, and a G5 with two Cinema Displays. Thatis just what Tom Yager of InfoWorld did recently, and he explains his reasons for switching, and the trials and triumphs encountered in that Switch, in his latest InfoWorld column titled, A migration project changes everything. Hereis an excerpt:

I think the news from the client side is more interesting because it caught me by surprise. Over the course of a week, my two-headed (dual display) Power Mac G5 became, without my conscious effort to make it so, the nerve center and productivity hub for my entire lab.

I kept loading the Power Mac G5 with software. Right now, on the Cinema display, iChat and iCal are open. So is Radio Userland. I have Terminal Server sessions open to two PCs under test (one is a laptop). Iim watching my Xserve cluster fill my Xserve RAID with a huge tests database. The Xserve RAID admin console is visible just to make sure that I donit actually set the thing on fire. There are two text Terminal windows, one local and one remote, and an X Window session into an Opteron Linux server thatis running SPEC benchmarks.

What surprised me is that as I opened each of the windows I planned to use, I didnit feel the need to close others to keep things "clean." It isnit a question of real estate or performance or capacity. Itis subjective, and I havenit found a way to explain it to myself much less express it here.